TOW #15 - Article: "Can DNA Reign Supreme in the Digital Dark Age?" by Roger Highfield

Roger Highfield, the director of external affairs at the Science Museum in England, addresses the issue of losing and not being able to obtain information in the future. Considering the fact that there are some billion gigabytes of data stored worldwide and that technology is rapidly progressing, it is necessary that mankind be able to develop ways in order to preserve the rapid increase in data. Highfield goes into a brief explanation of how storage on floppy disks that still remain today are unreadable by much of current technology. There is no software available and no program to open files, prompting scientists to craft new methods to store information. Highfield's solution to this problem is to use DNA to store all the information. Highfield refers to Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge, have created a way to store two thousand million million bytes per gram of DNA. It is speculated that DNA storage can last until the year 10 millennia. Specifying this issue primarily to the scientific community, Highfield attempts to provide an answer to this future problem and convince scientists to pursue research in issue. To achieve his purpose, Highfield includes historical evidence and scientific jargon. Historical evidence that is incorporated into this article provides the context from which Highfield creates his argument, which is to use DNA for storage purpose in the future. It sets the foundation of his argument, which is then used as evidence as to why newer and more improved methods of storage are essential. Additionally, Highfield's use of scientific jargon gets across his reasoning in a much easier fashion. Since his message is primarily towards scientists, using science-related vocabulary will help the audience understand what Highfield is trying to get across. With historical evidence and scientific jargon, Highfield was successfully able to achieve his purpose.


Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/10553626/Can-DNA-reign-supreme-in-the-digital-dark-age.html